my world of IT

After recently setting up a Moodle install (hosted on IIS on Server 2008 R2) with SSO (LDAP server based (good old Microsoft AD) with NTLM looking after things) we found that any new users were getting this error message appearing. Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting. The simple solution is to this problem is… Read more

UPDATE – This article has been replaced by this one (link), with a newer, faster A10 APU! A few days ago an article posted on the so called consumer tech blog Cnet.co.uk (link) seriously annoyed me; they claimed that for a little less than £350 you could build a gaming PC. The things that got me about their article were Use of a… Read more

Having recently setup DFS-R and DFS name spaces we found that our users were reporting that a security warning was popping up every time they opened any file from our DFS shares (example above). The warning in Word 2010 was The file  originated from an Internet location and might be unsafe. Click for more details. The silly thing about it… Read more

If you have ever tried to boot a VirtualBox VM into PXE (Microsoft WDS/MDT based) using the default Intel PRO/1000MT Desktop adapter you may have seen the error message FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted. The simple solution to this problem (and to get you booting into WDS) is to install the VirtualBox extension pack which can… Read more

Recently I have been doing a lot of movements of server roles, one of those was changing our DCs to newer servers that will be pure best practice based (nothing else on them other than AD/DNS/File Storage). One of the old server however had the Sophos Enterprise Console (v4.7 for anyone who is keeping count) on and after removing AD… Read more

After decommissioning an old Domain Controller I started to see Error 31196 crop up in our Lync server error logs, one of the messages I saw said- Collaboration platform has failed to provision the data. Collaboration platform has failed to provision the data because of the following exception: Exception: Microsoft.Rtc.Collaboration.ProvisioningFailureException:Cannot read contacts from Active Directory: Active Directory server “<yourservernamehere>” is… Read more

Well its taken a little while but the light at the end of the RDS Farm tunnel is in sight! After heavily modifying two X-Case RM 206 HS cases we now have our first batch of cookie sheet style servers ready for use. The video above goes around a bit of a tour of the case and the photos below… Read more

When setting up a new Moodle install with LDAP authentication I was finding that my test users wen’t able to login with the normal Active Directory user name/password (sAMAccountName). After a little playing I found that they could login fine if they used what is known as the container name (cn). After a little digging it turns out this is… Read more

On occasion it maybe necessary to forcefully remove a server from the DPM management console. Maybe you have taken the server out of use without first uninstalling the DPM client through the console or have some kind of weird issue with the server you are protecting. Regardless if you want to force remove a server from the DPM management console it… Read more

While waiting for the cases/power supplies to arrive for our RDS Server Farm I thought we might as well fire one up and do a little stress testing, the first results (which look at application load times) can be seen below. Here you see pretty much the entire Office 2007 and Adobe CS6 suite (with a few other programs thrown… Read more